In this blog, Judith Beyer describes and analyses a central characteristic of many ‘expert activists’ working in the field of statelessness: they struggle with what Beyer calls a ‘practitioner-scholar dilemma’. Despite the fact that they often do cross disciplinary boundaries and fields of practice in combining scholarly and activist work, they position themselves on one side of an imagined divide. Drawing on Gramsci, Beyer argues that the ‘practitioner-scholar dilemma’ originates in the way the state system structures the very possibilities of engagement with the issue of statelessness. She credits one newly emerging group of expert activists with the possibility to overcome this dilemma.